Business Resources10 of My Best Tips on How to Start a Tech Apprenticeship Program

If you haven’t yet read the IWSI America report on Modern Apprentices, then I suggest you do. It talks about how to get started with apprenticeship and gives a list of key tasks to tackle. Here’s my list of what you need to do to get started, based heavily on the list in the report, with a few extra tips I’ve learned on the way.

How to get started with apprenticeship:

1. Identify the roles you want to apprentice.
2. Create an internal team to formulate a plan for your apprentices.
3. Engage external partners who can help you train, mentor, or source apprentices.
4. Identify mentors and coaches within your existing team.
5. Outline candidate qualifications, if any.
6. Identify achievable core competencies for your apprentices.
7. Create on-the-job training goals and a curriculum, if training in-house.
8. Determine salary for both apprentice stage and full employee stage.
9. Consider EDI training for your staff.
10. Develop an on-going evaluation process that includes a plan for retaining apprentices and integrating them into (or changing) your company culture.

TalentPath is a training program that helps companies teach people how to code using our Techdegree curriculum. Those students then join the workforce as paid apprentices and subsequently as full-time developers. Read about how Mailchimp made huge gains for diversity in technology by applying these principles.

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